Denvention3 20 Essential Books Panel

At the 2008 Worldcon in Denver I moderated a panel titled “20 Essential Science Fiction Books of the Past 20 Years.” The other panelists were Charles N Brown, Gary K Wolfe, Graham Sleight and Karen Burnham. This essay includes the lists presented by each participant, and a few reflections on the panel.

Prior to selecting the works, we set ourselves a few ground rules. Most importantly we agreed not to quibble amongst ourselves about the meaning of “science fiction”, “essential”, “book” and even (for the benefit of those of us with dodgy math) “twenty”. If someone put a book on a list, that was OK.

Secondly we agreed that it was OK to treat a series as a single book so that, for example, it was not necessary to spend three choices on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Karen abused this shamelessly by nominating the entire Culture series.

We did not lay down any ground rules about the types of book allowed. Some panelists restricted themselves to novels, while others chose to range widely, even including things that are not normally regarded as “books”.

Finally, at Graham’s suggestion, we agreed to treat John Clute and Peter Nicholls’ Science Fiction Encyclopedia as a “free book” not counting towards the 20. This is because we all agreed that if there was one book that was absolutely essential, this was it. (The idea came from the BBC radio program, Desert Island Discs, in which the celebrity guests are all allowed to have a copy of their preferred religious book and the Complete Works of Shakespeare with them to their desert island. We did not discuss which of Clute and Nicolls was God and which Shakespeare.)

Graham also contributed the signature word of the panel: “emblematic”. In drawing up our lists, we mostly ended up not trying to pick the twenty “best” books (whatever “best” might mean), but rather a list of twenty that somehow encompassed the field as we understood it. Karen even imagined a man who had been living in a cave for 20 years and wanted us to tell him which books to read so that he could catch up on the state of science fiction since he had been away.

Here, then, are the lists, plus some commentary by some of the panelists.

This list is the one I’d sign up to today – putting it together was a very difficult exercise and I might change my mind tomorrow. As I said on the panel, I’m assuming that whatever desert island these books are lodged on also has a well-thumbed communal copy of the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of SF. I’ve gone back and forth on a couple of these titles, and so I’d like also to record another batch of books that were bubbling under and very nearly made it:

Good News From Outer Space, John Kessel (1989)

Grass, Sherri S Tepper (1989)

The MD, Thomas M Disch (1992)

The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents, Octavia E Butler (1994, 1999)

In doing this post I see that I got the title of the Sandman book wrong during the panel, but I did describe it correctly (it is the one containing the World Fantasy Award winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”).

My own bubbling under list, if I had one, would probably contain many of the books mentioned above, including Pattern Recognition, The Sparrow, China Mountain Zhang and Accelerando. My Banks pick would have been Inversions, but Use of Weapons is great too. And I have realized that I didn’t include anything emblematic of the SF Thriller, so I’d like to add White Devils by Paul McAuley.

Ian McDonald’s River of Gods was the only book (other that the Clute/Nicholls encyclopedia) to get the thumbs up from all of the panel. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books came close, but we couldn’t quite agree on which bits of the series we liked. Other writers featured prominently but with different books – notably Neal Stephenson.

Because I know people will count, here are the numbers of women writers mentioned by each panelist in their main lists:

Charles N Brown – 2

Gary K Wolfe – 3

Graham Sleight – 7

Karen Burnham – 3

Cheryl Morgan – 7 and Raphael Carter (who declines to identify)

Prior to the panel John Hertz wrote to me suggesting Infinite Worlds by Vincent Di Fate which is an encyclopedia of science fiction art. It is an October 1987 book so it just squeezes in, but it doesn’t cover anything that is new in our period. (Cheryl can’t read numbers – it is a 1997 book, and therefore very useful.)

Charles insisted on letting the audience know that he disapproved of many of the choices of his fellow panelists. We begged to disagree with him. In particular Karen and I came to the defense of Minister Faust whose work we both love.

There had been some suggestion prior to the panel of adding our suggestions for the 20 essential books of the next 20 years. My own contribution was Slash … (pronounced “Slash dot dot dot”), an anthology edited by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette and containing steamy stories of gay sex between male science fiction authors. The other panelists were unwilling to suggest anything in public, which is probably just as well.

Graham notes that a discussion along similar lines (and prompted by the panel) was run on SF Signal. You can read it here.

I did my own bit of data mining/organizing over at Spiral Galaxy, rating works and authors by how many folks put them on their lists, plus shuffling in items from Niall Harrison and the SFSignal comment thread.